Lack of Open Standards "gaping hole" in EC's Digital Agenda

on: 2010-05-19

The European Commission has officially published its long-awaited
Digital Agenda, outlining its policy plans for the next five years.
"While it includes some important building blocks for Free Software, the
omission of Open Standards rips a gaping hole in this agenda," says
Karsten Gerloff, President of the Free Software Foundation Europe.

FSFE welcomes the Commision's plans to give standards a greater role
in the public procurement of software, and to get dominant software
vendors to license their interoperability information, opening up
the software market for Free Software vendors.

However, the Digital Agenda falls short of systematically promoting
Free Software and Open Standards, missing the goals that the Member
States have set for the Commission in the
Granada
and Malmö
declarations. The Digital Agenda itself avoids any reference to Open
Standards. Instead, the Commission points to the European
Interoperability Framework. This is a document which is currently
being systematically hollowed out, as FSFE's analysis shows.

"The EC needs to adopt a strict definition of Open Standards, along the
lines of the first European Interoperability Framework," says Gerloff.
He continues: "The Commission needs to put Open Standards at the heart
of its strategy for the public sector's IT systems. Only with the
competition that Open Standards enable will we tap the full potential of
Free Software for European innovation."